Devotion and Meaning in Life

Workshop topic: our lives are pervaded by commitments: you might be committed to meeting a friend for dinner, exercising four times per week, learning a language, being considerate, sustaining a friendship, promoting a political cause.  Some commitments are relatively trivial and readily set aside.  Others are deeper and more resistant to change.  When people display extreme degrees of commitment, we sometimes describe them as devoted.  Devotion seems to involve a particularly robust form of commitment, which might differ from standard forms of commitment in its intensity, stability, resistance to compromise, epistemic status, or deliberative weight.  


This conference seeks to explore the relationship between devotion and meaning in life.  How does devotion connect to our desire for a meaningful or purposeful life?  What needs, longings, or motivations drive us to express devotion?  Do different objects of devotion (such as devotion to fitness communities, to sports teams, to political causes, etc.) fulfill these needs in different ways?  Is devotion linked in important ways to our identity?  To our sense of what is important?
   



Keynotes:


Ruth Chang (Oxford, Philosophy/Jurisprudence) 


Joshua Hicks (Texas A&M, Psychology)


Antti Kauppinen (Univ. of Helsinki, Philosophy)


Crystal Park (UConn, Psychology)
 



Speakers:


Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernardino)
“Meaning at the Limits of Practical Agency”


Casey Doyle (Binghamton University)
“Meaning, Self-Deception, and Dialectical Invulnerability”


Errol Lord (Univ. of Pennsylvania) 
“Devotion to Beauty and the Authoring of Our Selves”


Simon May (King's College London)
“The Child as the Archetypal Object of Devotion in Late Modernity”


Thaddeus Metz (Univ. of Pretoria)
“Beyond Devotion as a Source of Meaning”


Sanjeev Sikri (Indian Institute of Technology)
“Ekrūpatam and Sakhyabhakti: Finding Identity through Committed
Friendships in Ancient Indian Philosophy”


Justin White (Brigham Young University)
“Devotion, Fragile Meaning, and the Selves of Merleau-Ponty”


Jules Wong (Penn State)
“Devotion, Dissipation, and Gender”